The Mills’ family lived in the tenements around the factory of Brookes & Crookes, where they worked as spring-knife cutlers.  Willis Mills (1877-1947) later worked at Thomas Turner & Co.  He married Elizabeth Hibbert Banks (1875-1965) and their son, Ernest Henry Mills, was born in Sheffield on 30 October 1900.   Ernest joined his father as an apprentice in 1914.   In 1921, only months before the end of his seven-year apprenticeship, father and son lost their jobs during a slack period of trade and decided to go-it-alone at a small workshop in Napier Street (later they moved to Egerton Street).   Ernest recalled that his ‘first wage was five shillings [25p] a week – and they were long weeks:  nine hours on Mondays; 11 hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 12 hours on Fridays; and seven hours on pay-day, Saturdays.   And sometimes we had to put in overtime if we were behind with a job’.

The Second World War broke up the partnership.   Willis Mills died at Darlington on 26 November 1947, aged 70, leaving £496.  His unconsecrated grave (he was a Methodist) is in Abbey Lane Cemetery.  Ernest continued alone as ‘W. Mills & Son’.   From about 1950, he occupied a basement workshop at W. Gillott, 17 Eyre Lane, where he made knives for leading cutlery merchants and retailers: Mappin & Webb (London), Landells (Glasgow), Clement (London) and Dunhill (London).   They wanted high-quality pocket cutlery, such as smokers’ knives and champagne knives, made in silver and ivory.   Mills once said:  ‘I particularly liked making complicated knives – champagne and lobsters and anything like that ...  They were mostly made for the upper end, these country houses, Chatsworth House, those sorts of people.   The customers we had were very good’ (Jenkins and McClarence, 1989¹).

Ernest Mills was often interviewed about his working life (Farnsworth, 1981²).   Like many cutlers, a lifetime in the trade had embittered him and his ‘story’ was one of low wages, undercutting, and increasingly shoddy goods.   When interviewed by Jenkins and McClarence (1989), Mills recalled:

Undercutting went on all the time, all the time … [and] … no matter where you went there was always somebody ready to undercut you by a penny or tuppence a dozen.   And if you wanted an increase, there was a row.   They’d perhaps pay you for the first couple of weeks, then all of a sudden that knife would go off you and to someone who could make it cheaper.   So we were competing against each other ...  It made us very bitter.   Oh, yes.   We hated one another like poison.

Yet he always said he liked making knives, especially the finer qualities, worked in silver and gold.   The job must have had some attraction for him since he carried on working at Gillott’s beyond his retirement in 1985 (when he had made knives for about seventy years).   Ernest Mills, of Hemsworth Road, died on 6 September 1991, aged 90.  His estate was worth about £125,000.

^1. Jenkins, C, and McClarence, S, On the Knife Edge (Sheffield, 1989)

^2. Farnsworth, Keith, ‘The Craftsman [Ernest Mills] Who Can’t Find Time to Retire’, Quality 28 (September/ October 1981)